Trait & Social-Cognitive Perspectives on Personality

Module 26

Personality

• an individual’s characteristic pattern of: – thinking – feeling – acting

The Trait Perspective

Trait

• characteristic pattern of behavior •

What are some examples of traits?

generous cranky friendly sweet mean self-centered

The “Big Five” Traits

How would you describe your best friend?

The “Big Five” Traits

• • • • • Openness Extraversion Agreeableness Emotional Stability Conscientiousness

The “Big Five” Traits Could you give an adequate description of your best friend using only these five dimensions? Are there any other traits you think should be added?

“Big Five” Personality Inventory

Extroversion Orderliness Emotional Stability |||||||||||||| Accommodation |||||||||||||| Inquisitiveness |||||| |||||||||||||||||||| |||||||||||| 30% 84% 60% 60% 46%

“Big Five” Traits

• appear to be stable in adults • agreeableness & conscientiousness tend to increase as you get older • some argue the Big Five should also include positive-negative emotion or femininity masculinity

The Trait Perspective: Testing for Traits

Personality Inventories

• questionnaires on which people respond to items designed to gauge a wide range of feelings and behaviors • used to assess selected personality traits • often true-false, agree-disagree, etc. types of questions

Validity & Reliability

• • validity - measures what it is supposed to test reliability – provides consistent results • personality inventories offer greater validity and reliability than do projective tests

Which two projective tests have we discussed?

Why might personality inventories be more valid and reliable than projective tests?

MMPI (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory)

• best known personality inventory • 500 total questions • originally designed to assess abnormal behavior

MMPI Scoring Profile

Note: an average T-score is 50, scores over 65 suggest a psychological disorder

MMPI-2

• revised and updated version of the MMPI • Is it possible to beat the MMPI-2?

– Yes - it is possible to fake near-perfection on some of the scales by answering only in socially desirable ways

What is Myers-Briggs personality type?

Introverted (

I

) 61.76% Extroverted (E) 38.24% Sensing (

S

) 55.26% Intuitive (N) 44.74% Thinking (

T

) 58.06% Feeling (F) 41.94% Judging (

J

) 75.76% Perceiving (P) 24.24% Your type is: ISTJ

Evaluating the Trait Perspective

• does not consider how important the situation is to a particular trait

Do you act the same way in class as you do when you’re with friends at lunch?

• have an inability to explain

why

we behave the way we do; they limit themselves to statements of

how

we behave

The Social-Cognitive Perspective

Albert Bandura (1925-

• developed the social-cognitive perspective • people learn by observing and modeling others or through reinforcement •

social-cognitive perspective

to understand personality we need to consider: – the situation we’re in – and our thoughts before, during, and after an event –

)

Interacting with Our Environment: Three Influences

Reciprocal Determinism

• the mutual influences among personality and environmental factors • an interaction of three factors that shape personality: – thoughts or cognitions – the environment – a person’s behaviors • all behavior is the result of the interplay between external and internal factors

Reciprocal Determinism

The Social-Cognitive Perspective: Assessing Behavior in Situations & Evaluation

Assessing Personality

• Social-cognitive theorists prefer experiments that study how different situations affect people’s attitudes and behavior

(example: Bandura’s Bobo doll study)

• also look at a person’s past behavior patterns to predict the person’s future behavior

Evaluating Social-Cognitive View

• uses an objective and scientific approach • made researchers aware of the importance of the situation in the assessment of personality • major drawback: fails to consider the influence of emotions and motivation on behavior

End Class Notes – Fall 2011

Ancient Greek Traits

• Ancient Greeks classified four personality traits – sanguine (cheerful) blood – melancholic (depressed) – choleric (irritable) – phlegmatic (unemotional) black bile yellow bile phlegm •

Which body fluids are associated with each of the four personality traits?

Gordon Allport (1897-1967)

• personality should only be studied in normal adults (not those with a psychological problem) • rejected the idea of a “personality law” that would apply to everyone • believed individual personalities are unique (identified over 18,000 ways to describe people)

Raymond Cattell (1905-1998)

• interested in knowing whether some traits predicted others (pessimism & more likely to feel sad) • used statistics to calculate the relationships among traits until he came up with 16 key personality dimensions which he called factors • factors measured on a continuum

Factor Analysis Example

Rate yourself on the shy/bold continuum 1 shy 10 bold

Hans Eysenck (1916-1997)

• searched for personality dimensions in biology • found he could predict personality traits along genetically inherited dimensions • two findings include: – introversion/extraversion – emotionally unstable/stable

Eysenck’s Personality Factors: The Intercorrelation of Traits

Sample Questionnaire Items for Personality Research Questions are taken from Personality and Individual Differences, 6, Eysenck, S.B.G., Eysenck, H.J., & Barrett, P. A revised version of the psychoticism scale, 21-29. Copyright 1985, with permission from Elsevier Science.

Personal Control

How do our feelings of personal control affect our behavior?

Consider the following statements…

• • There’s no reason to vote in an election – your vote doesn’t really count.

or One person can make a difference in the way elected representatives think.

• • When you try to get a job, it’s not what you know that matters, but whom you know.

or If you want to be a success, depend on hard work, not luck.

Which two are closest to what you believe?

External or Internal Locus of Control

•

external locus of control

chance, or forces beyond a person’s control, control one’s fate – perception that •

internal locus of control

control our own fate – perception that we

Which group do you think is less depressed, more likely to be healthy, achieves more in school, acts more independently, and copes better with stress?

internal locus of control

Learned Helplessness

• people and animals who experience no control over repeated bad events tend to develop

learned helplessness

- hopelessness and passive resignation • Martin Seligman first demonstrated learned helplessness by studying dogs’ behaviors after receiving an electric shock

Optimistic Explanatory Style

• when something goes wrong the person explains the problem as: – temporary – not their fault – something limited to this situation

Pessimistic Explanatory Style

• when something goes wrong the person tends to: – blame themselves – make the event into a catastrophe – see the problem as beyond their control

How can pessimists overcome their negative outlook?

1.

2.

3.

4.

Disputing pessimistic thoughts Check for evidence that disproves pessimistic beliefs Consider alternative explanations for bad events Don’t generalize too much from a bad situation

Can you have too much optimism?

• Yes – may lead to a false sense of invincibility or unrealistic optimism about future life events